The selection of advertisements for presentation (e.g., display), such as with search results and other information, and the ordering of those advertisements, may be achieved by various techniques. In one exemplary technique, an initial determination is made to identify all advertisements that are a match or near match for applied search terms or other query items or information. The match may be made, for example, between one or more words in a query, and keywords identified by an advertiser and associated with a particular advertisement or group of advertisements, such as a campaign.
For example, a company selling fishing tackle may have a line of large lures, and may thus identify terms such as “lunker,” “sturgeon,” and “muskie fever” as keywords to associate with their advertisements for such large lures. Those advertisements may then be considered by the system for display when search results are displayed to a user who enters such terms. The comparison may also be made between a search or query, and the text in an advertisement or the text in a target of a hyperlink in an advertisement, or to a combination of keywords, target text, and advertisement text, among other possible techniques. For example, the system may effectively select terms from an advertisement as keywords so that the advertisement is selected for possible display when a search or other user action associated with the keywords is submitted. An advertisement may be selected for possible display if there is a “near” match also, for example, if a query includes terms that are known synonyms or mistypings/misspellings of the key word terms; for an advertisement. The group of matching advertisements may be termed a candidate group.
In some systems, when a user clicks on or otherwise selects the advertisement, a landing web page of the advertiser is displayed to the user. At the advertiser's web site, the user may make a purchase, download a document or file, or take some other measurable action. A number of metrics can be used to measure a performance of an advertisement campaign. For example, a click-through-rate is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an advertisement on a web page by the number of times the advertisement was delivered or rendered for viewing to a user (i.e., impressions). A conversion rate is the percentage of unique visitors who take a desired action (e.g., upon visiting the website). The desired action can be, for example, filling out a form, visiting a predetermined page, or completing a transaction or purchase. The performance metrics can be provided to advertisers to improve advertisement campaigns.